Part One — The Promise · Chapter 7 of 40

What They Say About Him

The dinner was in Thane in September, at the flat of a structural consultant called Pradhan whom Jagdish used twice a year and liked, and it had the composition such evenings always had: nine men, two wives who had come, one wife who had come and left at ten, and a quantity of food ordered for fourteen.

Jagdish went because Pradhan had asked twice. He did not enjoy these evenings. He had discovered in his thirties that he was bad at the part of the trade that happened in rooms with drink in them, not from any principle but because he ran out of things to say at about the ninety-minute mark and after that could only ask questions, which people mistook for interest and rewarded with more talking.

At about eleven a man he did not know began telling the table about Site 14.

The man’s name was Chitnis. He was in materials, he was perhaps forty, he had the loud fluency of somebody who has recently been promoted past the point where anyone corrects him, and he did not know who Jagdish was. This last was established early and comfortably: Pradhan had made the introductions at eight and Chitnis had arrived at nine.

“—no, no, listen, the creek plot. Near the bend. You know the one.”

“Fourteen,” said somebody.

“Fourteen. So this is ninety-one, ninety-two. The plot is with a family, four brothers, and three of them want to sell and one doesn’t, and there’s a case.” Chitnis had both hands out. “There’s a case, but the case is nothing. Any builder in this line takes that plot. You settle with the fourth brother, or you don’t settle and you build, because by the time it comes up the building is up and what is the court going to do, break it?”

“Nothing,” agreed somebody.

“Nothing. So it’s offered to Wagh — the Dombivli fellow, Wagh Infrastructure — and this is a man who at that time has what, five buildings? Six? He is nobody.” Chitnis said it with relish and without malice; it was a story and the story needed a nobody. “And he goes and he stands on that plot and he says no.”

Down the table a fork stopped.

“Why?” said Pradhan’s brother-in-law, who was in banking and was the only man present who had not heard it.

“Because of the fishermen.”

Jagdish put his glass down very carefully on a coaster.

“There were people on the creek side,” Chitnis said. “Not on the plot — near it. Been there God knows how long, no paper, nothing. And the drainage from that scheme was going to go — ” he made a gesture ” — and Wagh works it out, and he says no. Turns down the plot. Turns down, at that time, I’m telling you, three, four times the size of anything he had ever built. Because of people with no paper who could not have stopped him with a stick.”

“That’s not why,” said Jagdish.

He said it quite quietly and it did not carry past Pradhan, who turned and looked at him.

Chitnis was still going. “And you know what happened? Nothing happened. That’s the whole story. The plot sat. It’s still sitting. Nobody made a rupee off it, including Wagh. So was he right? On the books he was wrong. On the books he was an idiot.” He picked up his glass. “But I’ll tell you — I have been in this business nineteen years and there are four names in this district that mean the thing they say, and that man is one of them, and it is because of one plot he did not take when he was nobody. That is what it costs. One plot.”

There was the small silence that follows a story told well by a man who has had enough to drink to tell it well.

“He’s sitting at the end of the table,” said Pradhan.

The recovery was not as bad as it could have been. Chitnis was mortified for about forty seconds and then became delighted, which is the correct order and which Jagdish had seen before. He wanted to know whether he had got it right.

“Near enough,” Jagdish said.

“Near enough! Which part is wrong?”

“Most of the middle.”

“The brothers?”

“There were two brothers, not four, and neither of them wanted to sell. That plot was never in the family’s gift by ninety-one.” Jagdish turned his glass on the coaster. “And there was no case at that time. The case came in ninety-four.”

“But the fishermen—”

“There are no fishermen on that creek. There hasn’t been anything to fish out of that creek since before I was born.” He heard how flat his own voice had gone and made an effort. “There were eleven households on the far bank and they were not fishermen, they were a bhangar godown and the families that worked it, and they were not in the drainage line.”

Chitnis absorbed this with the good humour of a man whose story has been improved by contact with a primary source. “So what stopped you?”

And here is what Jagdish Wagh said, in Thane, in September of 2003, with eight men listening:

“It was a bad plot.”

“Ha!” Chitnis slapped the table, delighted. “A bad plot. Twelve years, and the man says it was a bad plot.”

The table laughed. Pradhan’s brother-in-law said something about modesty being a strategy, and somebody else said that in this business modesty was the only strategy left, and the conversation moved to the new flyover, and that was the end of it.

Jagdish had told the exact truth, and everybody at that table heard it as a great man declining to be praised.

He drove back to Dombivli after midnight with the windows down.

The version Chitnis had told was the version that existed. Jagdish had encountered it four or five times over the years, in pieces, always secondhand, and it had improved steadily in the telling: in 1996 it had been a legal question, by 2000 it had acquired the drainage, and now, in Pradhan’s flat, it had acquired the fishermen, who had never existed, and who were the detail that made the whole thing move.

He had corrected the brothers. He had corrected the case. He had corrected the fishermen. And then, at the exact point where a man is asked the only question that matters, he had said four words that were true and useless and had let the table fill in the rest for itself, because the rest, whatever it was, was his.

It would be convenient to record that he felt shame about this on the drive home.

What he felt was something nearer to tiredness, and one clear thought, which arrived on the Kalyan road somewhere past the pipeline and which he did not welcome:

I have twelve years of credit from a plot I did not take, and I am about to spend all of it on a building I have not finished.

He got in at one. The light was on in the front room. His mother was awake and marking, and she looked at him over her glasses and did not ask, and he went to bed.