Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 24 of 40

The Ledger of the Wait

He gave them October in the first four minutes and he did it properly.

Programme in hand, Salvi beside him, the second week of October named as a date Salvi would put his name to and did, out loud, in front of twenty-nine people, which was not a thing Jagdish had asked him to do and which he never forgot. The remaining items listed: external plaster, flooring on two floors, the common passage on the second, the certificate. No adjectives. No circumstances.

He apologised for April. He apologised for the four months of silence after April, and he did not explain them, because he had understood in Ketkar’s office that the explanation — I was waiting for a date that would hold — was the confession and not the defence.

The room took it. It took it flatly and without warmth, which was the difference from November, and Bhalerao said thank you, and there was a pause of the kind that comes before a meeting ends.

And Jagdish Wagh, instead of sitting down, said:

“I want to ask you something and you are all entitled to refuse.”

“I have paid the rent for thirty-eight months. It went out on the first of the month every month except once, and I gave notice on that one, and I have always believed — I want to say this plainly because I have believed it my whole working life — that the rent is the answer. A family is out of its house; you pay for a house; the account is square, and what is left over is the building, and I give you the building.

“I don’t think that any more.

“I’m not able to tell you what I think instead. I’ve been trying to work it out since Wednesday and I can’t get to the end of it. So I am going to ask you a question that my lawyer has told me not to ask, and I want to say before I ask it that there is no money attached to it. I am not opening a negotiation. If you tell me a thing tonight it does not become a claim and I will not have it used against you and it will not be used by me.

“What has it cost you? Not the money — I have the money, the money is in my accounts. The other thing. Whatever the other thing is.

“You don’t have to answer. Bhalerao saheb, if you want to close the meeting now, close it.”

Bhalerao did not close the meeting.

What follows is what was said, in the order it was said, in a school hall in Kopar between seven-fifty and nine-twenty on the eleventh of August 2006. Jagdish wrote it down. He had a notebook out on the table in front of him within ninety seconds of asking, and he wrote for about an hour and twenty minutes, and the notebook is the reason this account exists.

Bhalerao, first, because somebody had to be first and he understood that:

“Three years, one month, nineteen days. My wife has arranged that flat in her head four times. Not the same way twice. She does it in the evening.” He stopped for a moment. “She has not seen the inside of it. You have shown us the outside eleven times.”

Gokhale, second:

“My father is eighty-six. He bought that flat on the original allotment in 1964, before the building was up, on a piece of paper. Since two thousand and four he does not know where he is in the evenings. He asks for the old flat. Not our house — the old flat, the way it was.” He had his hands in his lap. “He will not know the new one. Whatever you build, he goes to a place he has never been. If you had finished in August last year I think he would have known it. I am not saying you owe me anything for that. I am answering the question.”

The elder Deshpande, third, at some length, and the room let him, and about eleven minutes in he arrived at it:

“We knocked the wall through in 1988. Two flats, one kitchen. My brother’s wife and my wife have cooked in the same kitchen for eighteen years.” He looked at the table. “In the new building we are on the fourth and the seventh. It is in Annexure B. We agreed it, nobody cheated us, the areas are right. It was the only way the plates worked.” A pause. “So the thing that has ended is not a thing that you did. It ended in June 2003 and none of us said anything about it because we were all busy carrying boxes. Three years in the transit flats at Kopar, my brother is eleven doors down the same corridor. That is the last time. From October we are three floors apart with a lift in between and my brother is sixty-four.”

The younger Deshpande said nothing, which everybody noticed.

Mrs. Joshi, fourth:

“My son changed school twice. Once in 2003 because Kopar was too far from the old one, and once in 2005 because the first one was not good and we thought it was only for a few more months.” She said it quickly. “He is nineteen now. He says it does not matter. He was fourteen and sixteen.”

Sanjay Ranade, fifth, asked directly by Bhalerao, because Bhalerao knew about the rent in January 2005 and had spent nineteen months not knowing whether he should have known more:

“It has not cost me anything.”

His daughter was sitting in the fourth row.

He wrote to Bhalerao eleven days later, four lines, for the file, because he had thought about it for eleven days and had decided that a thing that had happened should be somewhere.

Sanjay Kanetkar, sixth. He had driven from Mulund and was not going to speak, and then he did:

“My mother asked you for a Diwali.”

That was all of it. He did not add anything to it and nobody in the room said anything for some seconds, and Jagdish wrote the sentence down in a notebook with his hand not entirely steady, and it is the shortest entry on the page and the only one with nothing after it.

Mrs. Ranade said her knees were the same as they would have been anywhere and that this was not his business.

The Naiks, eighth and last, and this is the part that nobody has ever quite forgiven:

“Twenty-two lakh forty.”

Mr. Naik had a sheet of paper. He had prepared it. He had the rent received against the rent foregone on the flat he would have let, the interest on the corpus, the difference between the market at the date of possession and the market now, and the registration cost of the flat he had bought elsewhere in 2005 because he had got tired of waiting.

“That is the figure to date,” he said. “It goes up by about forty thousand a month.”

He was correct. Every number on his sheet was correct and defensible and he was the only person in that hall who had understood the question in the sense in which a court would have understood it, and if the society had ever gone to a forum his sheet would have been the only document with any value in it whatsoever.

The room hated him for it. Not loudly — a movement, a settling, three people looking at the floor. And Naik knew it, and had known it before he stood up, and stood up anyway, because he had been asked a question and he had the answer.

Jagdish came out at nine-forty with eleven pages.

He sat in the car in the school compound with the notebook open on the wheel and read them, and the thing that broke him was not any single entry. It was that he had asked for a ledger and had been given a list that would not add.

A wall knocked through in 1988. An eighty-six-year-old man who would arrive in a room he had never seen. A boy who changed school twice and was now nineteen and said it did not matter. Four imagined arrangements of a flat, done in the evenings, by a woman who had not been inside it. A Diwali.

And, at the bottom, in a different category from all of it, twenty-two lakh forty and rising at forty thousand a month — the only figure on the page, produced by the only man who had not been hurt.

He had asked the question in order to find out what he owed. He had asked it because a debt with a number on it can be paid, and paying is a thing he was good at, and he had spent thirty-eight months and twenty-six lakh proving that he would pay for anything that could be priced.

There was no total. There was no mechanism for arriving at a total. There was not even a currency: you cannot convert eleven doors down a corridor into rupees and you cannot convert rupees into a Diwali, and the only entry in the whole ledger that could be paid was the one from the man who had lost nothing that mattered.

Ketkar heard about the question on the Monday, from the younger Deshpande’s son-in-law, and telephoned, and was told by Pallavi that Wagh saheb was on site, and telephoned again at seven, and said one sentence and hung up, and the sentence was: “I told you not to make a speech.”

He was right, in the way he was right about everything that month. It was, legally, the most expensive ninety seconds of Jagdish Wagh’s career, and nothing whatever came of it, because eleven households in Kopar chose not to use it, and the choosing not to use it was the last thing that society ever gave him.