Part One — The Promise · Chapter 6 of 40

Transit

Vacant possession was fixed for the twenty-second of June and the shifting ran across the four days before it, and it went, by the standards of such things, well.

Nikam had the tempo and the sequence. Bhalerao had the key register, ruled in his own hand, eleven rows, three columns — flat, keys received, date — and stood in the compound with it for four days like a man conducting his own funeral with great competence. The Deshpandes shifted together and argued about the kitchen wall for the last time in its presence. The Naiks, who had bought last year and had never really lived in the building, were out in ninety minutes and gone.

The Gokhale family took a photograph in front of the building on the morning of the twenty-first, all nine of them, three generations, with the youngest child held up at the front so that his face was in the frame. Jagdish saw the photograph three years later, framed, in the new flat, and had to leave the room.

Mrs. Kanetkar did not pack.

It was not refusal. That is what made it difficult. A refusal has an edge you can take hold of.

She had said yes to everything. She had voted yes in March. She had accepted the change of floor in Annexure B with a grace that made Jagdish uncomfortable — she had thanked him, in front of her son, for something she should not have had to be given. She had told Nikam which day suited her. When the day came she was dressed and ready and sitting in the front room with her hands in her lap, and the flat around her was exactly as it had been for forty-one years.

Nikam telephoned the office. Nikam was thirty-four and good at logistics and entirely unequipped for this, and said, in the tone of a man reporting a mechanical failure, that flat 4 had not started.

“Has she said why?”

“She says she’ll do it.”

“Then leave her. Do the Joshis and go back at four.”

At four she had not started. At six-thirty Nikam rang again and Jagdish told him to finish the day and to say nothing to anybody, and then he sat in the eleven-by-nine room for some time with the four schedules on the wall.

He could have sent Meera. That would have worked; that would probably have worked better. He could have sent her son, who was fifty and lived in Mulund and would have come.

He went himself on the Sunday, with newspaper and twine and eleven cartons in the boot, and he did not tell anyone in the office he was going, which is a fact he noticed himself noticing at the time and did not pursue.

She opened the door and was not surprised.

“You’ve come to shout.”

“I’ve come to pack.”

Mrs. Kanetkar looked at the cartons stacked against his leg for a while.

“You’ll do it wrong,” she said, and stood back to let him in.

He did it wrong for the first forty minutes. He wrapped the brass in newspaper without washing it, which she permitted for six pieces and then stopped, and made him carry the whole tray to the sink; and he put the pressure cooker in with the crockery, which produced a silence he could feel through the back of his neck; and he wrote KITCHEN on a carton in English, and she made him write it again in Marathi underneath, because, she said, the man carrying it would not be an English-reading man, and why should the man carrying it have to work harder than the man writing on it.

He conceded that. He wrote it in Marathi on the other ten as well.

They worked through the afternoon. She sat on a stool and directed and he did the lifting, and by three o’clock a system had established itself in which she named a thing and its destination and he wrapped it, and the naming took longer than the wrapping because almost nothing in that flat was only a thing.

The steel dabba was from her wedding. The two brass lamps had been four. The clock had stopped in 1994 and had been left on the wall stopped, because her husband had wound it and she was not going to be the one to wind it after him; and Jagdish, who had spent seventeen years being brisk with sentiment because the trade did not allow for it, wrapped the stopped clock in three sheets of newspaper and put it in the carton marked BEDROOM and said nothing at all.

At four she said: “You’ve been in this building before.”

“Twice. The survey and the meeting.”

“Before that. Nineteen seventy-something. You came with your father.”

Jagdish stopped with a dish in his hands.

“He was seeing Marathe on the third floor about a plot at Kopar,” she said. “You waited on the stairs. Fourteen, fifteen years old. You had a schoolbag.”

He had no memory of it whatsoever. He had a clear and specific memory of the shape of the staircase, which he had assumed came from the survey.

“He was a nice man, your father. He talked too much.” She adjusted her feet on the stool. “Your mother taught my grandson. He’s in Pune now. Engineer.”

“What kind?”

“The computer kind,” said Mrs. Kanetkar, with contempt so mild it was almost affection.

He carried the cartons down at half past five.

The building had no lift. It had never had a lift; that was the whole reason it was being knocked down, or a fifth of the reason, along with the plumbing and the concrete and the FSI. So he carried eleven cartons and two bags and a folded steel cot down one flight — she was on the first floor, which was why Meera had made him move her back to the first floor in the new building, which was two years and a lakh and a half away and did not exist yet — and he stacked them by the gate for Nikam’s tempo in the morning.

Eleven cartons. He counted them twice out of habit and then stood there in the compound in June with his shirt through and his forearms marked from the twine.

It did not strike him then. That is the thing to be clear about. There was no moment in the compound on the twenty-second of June 2003 in which Jagdish Wagh stood among eleven cartons and thought of what he had said in the hall in February. He was thinking about the tempo, and about whether Nikam had the gate key, and about the two point one metres of fill in the corner near the compound wall.

The sentence had been you’ll be back in your own house and I will carry the boxes up myself.

He carried them down. He carried them down first, four months into a twenty-six-month programme, and it did not occur to him for three years that he had done the second half of the promise before the first.

She came down last, with her son, who had driven from Mulund after all.

At the gate she turned round and looked at the building the way people do, and Jagdish, who had watched perhaps a hundred and forty people perform this exact turn in eleven societies, watched her do it and found that he had looked away.

“Twenty-six months,” she said.

“Twenty-six months.”

“I’m seventy-eight.”

“I know.”

“Then don’t tell me twenty-six months,” said Mrs. Kanetkar. “Tell me a Diwali. Which Diwali?”

Jagdish did the arithmetic in his head, and the arithmetic said August of 2005, and Diwali of 2005 fell in November, and there was a hidden five weeks in the programme of which four were already gone into the ground at the compound wall.

“Two thousand and five,” he said. “You’ll do the rangoli in your own doorway in 2005.”

She got into her son’s car.

He was not, on any reading, lying. In June of 2003 the completion date was August 2005 and every schedule on his wall said so, and he had never in his life given a family a date he did not believe.

He would think about the word Diwali a great deal in the winter of 2005, and again in 2006, and once, badly, in 2008.