Part One — The Promise · Chapter 9 of 40

Monsoon

The rain came back in the third week of September, after everyone had stopped expecting it, and it stayed for nineteen days.

This is not remarkable. Every builder in that district lost days to a late September in some year or other, and the men on site treated it the way they treated all weather, which was as a condition of employment rather than an event. Nikam had the tarpaulins up on the second day. The debris tempos ran when the road allowed and did not when it did not.

What it cost was three weeks on the start of the excavation, which is why the corner by the compound wall was opened on the ninth of October instead of the middle of September, and which is the reason the well was found in October rather than in a month when Jagdish would have had more room to think about it.

He noted the three weeks in the site diary in the ordinary way. Rain was in clause 9(b). It was the least contentious item on the list of eleven; nobody in the history of Indian construction has ever gone to court over a monsoon. If he had gone to the society in October and said I have lost three weeks to unseasonal rain, they would have said, correctly, that this was nobody’s fault and that God had signed the agreement too.

He did not go to them about the rain either. It came in the same silence as the ground, and it had not occurred to him that the two were being kept quiet for different reasons — one because telling would cost him nothing and mean nothing, the other because telling would cost him a date — and that by the end of the year he could no longer distinguish between them.

The schedule board in the eleven-by-nine room was ruled in permanent marker with the columns in pencil, and on the last working day of December 2003 it read, in the Shivaji Chowk column, in Jagdish’s own handwriting:

Completion: Aug 2005.

This was, in every formal sense, correct. The programme had not been revised. No revision had been issued to Ketkar, or to the bank, or to the society, or to anybody. The date on the board on the thirty-first of December 2003 was the same date that had been on the board on the eleventh of February.

Underneath it, in the same hand, in pencil, small, at the bottom of the column, there was nothing.

Because that was the entry that did not exist. Nowhere in the office above the bank, in any schedule, file, diary or account, was there a line that said:

Margin at start: 5 weeks. Piling: −4. Ground and well: −7. Rain: −3. Margin now: minus 9.

The pieces were all recorded. The piling was in the variation note he had taken to the society in February; the ground was in Pradhan’s file and in twenty-six lakh of invoices; the rain was in the site diary in Nikam’s writing on nineteen consecutive days.

It was only the arithmetic that was nowhere, and the arithmetic was nowhere because the margin itself had never been written down. Jagdish had hidden five weeks in a programme in his own head in January 2003, on the principle — he had believed it for eleven societies and it had been true for eleven societies — that a margin you write down is a margin somebody spends.

So there was no line to draw down. There was no page where the five became one and then went past zero into a number with a sign in front of it. There was a man, driving between four sites, who knew.

He knew in the way you know a thing you have not said.

Meera asked him twice that winter. Not about the margin; she did not know there was a margin. She asked him, once in November and once in the first week of January, whether Shivaji Chowk was all right, and both times he said yes, and both times what he meant was: it is recoverable.

That was not a lie either. In January of 2004 it was recoverable. Nine weeks against a twenty-month remaining programme is recoverable; you buy it back in the slab cycle and the finishing, you spend money on it, you work Sundays in the last four months. Jagdish had bought back nine weeks before. He had bought back eleven, at Ambernath, in 1999, and nobody in that society had ever known there had been anything to buy back.

Everything he believed in December 2003 was reasonable. That is the difficulty with the year. A man who had made a series of unreasonable decisions would be easy to describe.

On New Year’s Eve he drove out to the site at about nine at night, alone, which he did not usually do and never afterwards admitted to.

The compound was dark and the watchman let him in. The raft was down over where the well had been. Below the ground line there were now three hundred and eleven cubic metres of engineered fill, twenty-six lakh of piling, a raft designed by a good consultant, and a filled brick well from before he was born, all of it entirely invisible and all of it, in his view, the best work his firm had ever done.

Above the ground line there was nothing at all.

That is what he stood and looked at for about ten minutes on the last night of 2003: a level plot in a tight compound, eighteen months from a Diwali he had named to a woman of seventy-eight at a gate in June, with the whole of the first year’s work under the earth where nobody would ever see it, and not one course of brick to show eleven families in Kopar who had now been out of their houses for six months and eight days.

He thought: they have nothing to look at.

It is the only recorded instance in that first year of Jagdish Wagh thinking about the project from the direction of the transit flats, and he had the thought at nine o’clock at night in an empty compound with nobody to say it to, and he did not act on it — did not, for example, drive to Kopar in January with the photographs of the well and the raft and show eleven families the twenty-six lakh he had spent under their building.

He drove home instead.

The first slab went up in April. By then it was 2004, and Ambernath had finished, and the firm was down to three sites, and the permission for the amended plan had been lying on a desk in the corporation office since the ninth of February.

End of Part One