Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 30 of 40

What the Register Says

The last entry is dated the nineteenth of November 2006 and reads:

19/11/06 — All 11 families in occupation. Transit flats vacated. Final transit rent recd 1/11/06. Register closed.

Under it, in the same small upright hand, on the next line, is the only sentence in two hundred and seven entries that is not a fact:

Kept from 14/3/05 because I could not answer the members.

He stood down at the annual general meeting on the tenth of December, having been secretary for twelve years and having said for four of them that he would stop as soon as they were back in the building. Nobody had believed him. He had meant it since about 2004.

The handover of charge was done properly, over an evening, in the new society office on the ground floor of a building that had two lifts — a room the old building had not had, which was in the plan, which Jagdish had put there in 2002 because a society of eleven families with no office ends up meeting in schools.

The incoming secretary was a man called Phatak. He had bought the Naiks’ original flat in 2005 — the Naiks having got tired of waiting and bought elsewhere, which is on Naik’s sheet — and had therefore never lived in the old building, never attended the meeting of the eleventh of February 2003, never been in transit, and never met Jagdish Wagh except to shake his hand at a table with a cloth on it in October.

He was forty-four, thorough, and entirely without history in the matter, and this is the reason the chapter happens the way it does.

The records came across in six items. Phatak wrote them down as they were handed over, because that is what a handover of charge is.

Minute books, three. Cash book and vouchers. Correspondence file including the development agreement and annexures. Key register 2003. Transit rent receipts, thirty-eight months. And, last, a long hard-backed register with a torn corner that Bhalerao put on the table and did not immediately let go of.

“This one isn’t a society record,” he said. “I kept it myself. It’s not minutes and it has no standing and you can put it in the cupboard or you can put it in the bin.”

Phatak, being thorough, said that if it was going into the cupboard it had to be listed, and if it was going to be listed he would have to know what it was, and asked what was in it.

Bhalerao said: “Dates.”

And Phatak — who was not being cruel, who was doing the job in front of him, who had a handover to complete and eleven items to list and no idea whatever that the room had gone quiet — opened it at the first page and began to read it out.

He read the whole thing.

It took about fifty minutes. There were nine people in the room: Phatak, Bhalerao, the outgoing and incoming treasurers, Gokhale, the elder Deshpande, Mrs. Joshi, Sanjay Ranade, and a committee member from the fourth floor who had come to sign something and stayed.

14/3/05 — Register begun. Cheque recd 1/3. Site visit 6/3 (self). Struct approx 9 flrs. Brick approx 5 flrs. Plaster nil. Men counted 34 (Sun).

2/4/05 — Cheque recd 1/4.

9/4/05 — Asked Wagh saheb office by phone re date. Pallavi bai says will ask. No reply as at 16/4.

He read them flat, the way a man reads an inventory, because to him that is what it was. He did not know that the entry for the nineteenth of April 2005 — Kanetkar aaji expired 4 am. Flat 4 — was going to be followed forty seconds later by 1/5/05 — Cheque recd 1/5, and that the two of them read consecutively in a level voice would do what they did to the room.

He did not know that 20/9/05 — Wagh saheb will come and meet society. No date given for meeting was going to be followed by eleven entries before the twelfth of November.

He did not know, reading 11/6/06 — Drove past. Lifts appear working (lights). Bldg appears complete from outside, that four people in the room had done the same thing that month and not told each other.

He read the rent entries. All nineteen. Eighteen of them recording money arriving on time.

Nobody stopped him. That is the part Bhalerao thought about afterwards. Six people in that room had lived every line of it and not one of them said that’s enough, and he could not decide, then or later, whether that was because they wanted to hear it or because none of them could think of a reason to give.

At the end Phatak closed it and said, “So it’s a diary.”

“Yes,” said Bhalerao.

“Then I’ll list it as one,” and he wrote, in the handover memorandum, item six: Register (personal, ex-secretary), 2005–06.

It is in the society cupboard now.

Jagdish was not in the room and was never told about it directly.

He heard, in the way things reached him, from three sources across five weeks: from Gokhale, at a Federation meeting in January, who mentioned it as an odd thing that had happened and said nothing else about it; from Nikam, who had it from a watchman; and from the elder Deshpande, at some length, in a tea shop, in the course of a conversation about something else.

Deshpande’s version had a detail the other two did not, and Jagdish believed it because it was the kind of detail nobody invents.

“When he got to April 2005 — the old lady — Phatak read it out and then he read the next one, which was the cheque, and then he stopped for a second, and he looked up, because he had heard it himself.” Deshpande turned his cup round. “And then he read the cheque one again. To be sure he had it right. He read it twice.”

Jagdish did not say anything.

“He wasn’t there for any of it,” Deshpande said. “That’s the thing. Bhalerao read that book to himself for twenty months and it was just his dates. Phatak read it once out loud and it was —”

He did not finish the sentence, because he could not find the end of it, and he was a man who finished sentences.

There is nothing in the register that Jagdish Wagh did not already know.

He had read it himself, all two hundred and six entries, in an office above a bank on the ninth of August 2006, for forty minutes, while a sixty-eight-year-old man drank a cup of tea he had not asked for.

What he had not done, and what a room of nine people in a ground-floor office in December did, was hear it in order, at one sitting, in a level voice, from beginning to end.

He never asked to. It would have been available to him at any time; it was in a cupboard forty minutes’ walk from his flat, and Phatak, being thorough and having no history in the matter, would have handed it over without hesitation to anybody who asked.

He thought about asking perhaps four times over the next three years.

The last of those times was in November 2008, in a car, four days after a signature.

End of Part Three