Part One — The Promise · Chapter 3 of 40

Forty People

Salvi did have a face, and the face was about the soil.

“Two point one,” he said, before Jagdish had put his bag down. “Corner near the compound wall, two point one metres and then it’s fill.”

“The report says four.”

Jagdish sat. The room was eleven feet by nine and had a window that looked at another window, and on the wall behind him were four printed schedules, one per live site, in the format he had designed himself in 1991 and had never improved on because it did not need improving.

“Whose fill?”

“Nobody’s. It’s forty years old. Somebody levelled that corner before the building went up and whoever it was is dead.” Salvi put the report on the desk and turned it round, which was a thing he did, and which Jagdish had stopped finding irritating around 1999. “Piles. Not everywhere. That corner and probably the one behind it.”

“Cost.”

“I’ll have it Thursday. Guess is nine, ten lakh.”

“Time.”

“Three weeks. Maybe four in the running.”

Jagdish looked at the schedule on the wall — the Shivaji Chowk column, still theoretical, still in pencil because the society had not voted — and did the arithmetic he had already done twice in his head on the stairs.

Twenty-six months. Five weeks hidden in it that nobody knew about, not the society, not Bhalerao, not Meera. Four of them now spoken for by a corner of ground that a man had levelled in 1962 for reasons of his own.

“Do the piles,” he said. “Get me the number Thursday and I’ll take it to them before the vote, not after.”

Salvi’s eyebrows moved about a millimetre. “Before?”

“If I tell them in March they say fine. If I tell them in July they say what else haven’t you told us.” He was already writing. “Also it’s cheaper. A society that’s voted is a society that can say no to a variation. A society that hasn’t voted just wants to vote.”

“That’s a cynical way to put an honest thing.”

“It’s the only way I know how to put it,” Jagdish said, and Salvi laughed, and that was the end of the ground for four months.

The firm had forty people on the rolls that February, which was as many as it ever had.

Nine of them were in the office above the bank: Meera, who had not kept the books since 1998 and who came in three days a week anyway; two accountants who had replaced her and between them did not do what she had done; a purchase man; two juniors; a draughtsman who worked for three firms and admitted to two; and a receptionist called Pallavi who ran the entire enterprise and was paid less than the draughtsman.

The rest were on sites. Four live jobs — a twenty-two-flat building at Thakurli, a small commercial thing near the station that Jagdish disliked and had taken for the cash flow, a society at Ambernath in its last four months, and, from June, Shivaji Chowk.

Four sites was one more than the firm had ever run at once. Jagdish had noticed this in December and had thought about it for a full evening and had concluded that it was fine.

The conclusion was not lazy. He had reasons. Ambernath would finish in June, which brought it back to three. The commercial job needed nothing from him but signatures. The Thakurli building was Kambli’s and Kambli had done four of these. And Salvi — Salvi had been with him since 1994, had run Ambernath end to end without a single item on the snag list that Jagdish had had to raise himself, and was in every respect except the letterhead a builder.

So it was fine. He had reasoned it out. What he had not done, at any point in the reasoning, was ask how many hours there were in a week and how many of them a man could spend standing on ground.

The partner was called Rege and he was leaving.

This was not dramatic and had been agreed since October. Rege had put in four lakh in 1986, which was most of the firm’s original capital and all of Rege’s, and had spent seventeen years being right about steel and wrong about almost everything else, and was now fifty-eight and wanted to go and live near his daughter in Pune. The buyout was done in instalments across two years at a valuation both of them privately thought was generous in the other’s favour, which is the only kind of valuation that ever gets signed.

They did the last of the paperwork that afternoon in the eleven-by-nine room, with Pallavi witnessing, and afterwards Rege sat back and looked at the four schedules on the wall.

“Four sites.”

“Ambernath finishes in June.”

“So three sites and a redevelopment.” Rege had a way of restating a thing so that it sounded worse without any word of it being untrue. “Who’s on Shivaji Chowk?”

“Salvi.”

“Day to day?”

“Day to day.”

Rege nodded slowly and did not say anything, and Jagdish, who had spent seventeen years learning to read exactly that silence, said: “What.”

“Nothing. Salvi’s good.”

“He’s better than good.”

“He’s better than good,” Rege agreed. “He’s also never had eleven families living in your transit flats while he does it. A society is not a plot, Jagdish. On a plot the only person you can disappoint is the man who bought the flat, and he doesn’t exist yet.”

“I’ll be there.”

“How many days a week?”

Jagdish opened his mouth to answer.

It is worth recording what happened in that half-second, because it was the only moment in 2003 in which the thing was visible, and because neither man in the room noticed it. Jagdish began to say three, and the arithmetic that had been running under everything since the stairs that morning produced, without being asked, the true figure, which was one and a half. And because one and a half was not an answer that could be said out loud to a departing partner without opening a conversation that would take two hours and change nothing, he said:

“Enough.”

“Right,” said Rege.

And then Pallavi came in about the Ambernath water connection, and Rege signed the last sheet, and they went down to the tea shop by the station because that was what you did when a partnership of seventeen years ended, and it was pleasant, and neither of them ever returned to the subject.

The corridor happened on a Tuesday, two weeks later, and took nine seconds.

Jagdish was going one way with the commercial job’s fire NOC in his hand and Salvi was coming the other way with a rolled drawing, and they met near the photocopier where the corridor narrowed and both of them turned sideways.

“Chowk vote’s Sunday,” Salvi said.

“I know.”

“If it’s yes, keys by June?”

“Keys by June.”

“Then I’ll put Nikam on the transit shifting and I’ll take the demolition myself, and we do the weekly on Fridays like Ambernath, and you come when you come.”

“Fine,” said Jagdish.

That was all of it. You come when you come, and fine, said sideways at a photocopier by two men who had worked together for nine years, neither of whom would have been able, three years later, to remember the exchange at all — Salvi truthfully, Jagdish less so, because by then he would have gone looking for the moment and not found it, and would have had to accept that there had not been a moment, only a Tuesday.