Part Two — The Slip · Chapter 13 of 40

Rent Day

The transit rent went out on the first of the month by eleven separate cheques, signed by Jagdish, written by Pallavi on the twenty-eighth, and collected from the office by whoever came — which in practice meant Bhalerao came for six of them and the other five families came for their own.

It had gone out on the first, or on the second when the first was a Sunday, nineteen times.

In January 2005 it went out on the ninth.

The reason was Thakurli. The twenty-two-flat building had sold nine flats in the quarter and the money for four of them was held up in one buyer’s loan disbursement, which was a bank’s problem and not the firm’s, and which resolved itself entirely on the seventh of January. In the first week of that month Wagh Infrastructure had, on paper, more money coming than it had ever had, and in the current account it had one lakh ninety.

Pallavi came in on the thirty-first of December with the eleven cheques and did not put them on the desk.

“Do I write them?”

“Write them.”

“And date?”

Jagdish looked at the ledger she had put beside them, which she had not been asked to bring.

There were three ways through it and he did all three sums in about forty seconds. He could sign eleven cheques on a balance that would clear perhaps seven of them, which was the one thing he would not do, because a builder’s cheque coming back from a society’s bank is not a delay, it is a fact that lives forever. He could pay Tayde late — but Tayde was eleven days late already and Tayde had one truck. He could pay himself late, which he had done for eleven years, and which no longer had any room in it because he had done it.

“Date them the ninth,” he said. “And tell Bhalerao today. Not on the second when he comes. Today.”

That last instruction was the correct one and it was the best decision Jagdish Wagh made in the whole of that January, and he made it in nine seconds without consulting anybody.

Pallavi telephoned Bhalerao on the thirty-first of December 2004 and told him the transit rent would be paid on the ninth of January, on account of a buyer’s loan, and that Wagh saheb had asked her to say so in advance.

Bhalerao took it well and said the correct things. He was a reasonable man and he had run a society for eleven years and he understood a loan disbursement perfectly, and he told four of the six families he collected for, because there was no need to trouble the other two, whose cheques he could cover from the society’s own account for nine days.

Two families noticed on their own.

The first was the elder Deshpande, who noticed everything and who telephoned the office on the fourth to say that he had noticed, and to say that he did not mind, and to establish, in a conversation of about four minutes, that he had noticed. Jagdish took the call himself and was pleasant, and that was the end of it and it was never mentioned again by anybody.

The second was Mrs. Ranade.

Mrs. Ranade was sixty-six and her knees were the reason she had asked about lifts in a hot hall in February 2003, and she lived in the transit flat at Kopar with her son Sanjay, who was thirty-eight and worked in a firm that made industrial fasteners, and Sanjay’s wife and their two children.

Their household ran on a sequence. The transit rent cheque arrived on the first or the second. It was banked the same day. It cleared on the fourth or the fifth. On the fifth, Sanjay paid the school fees for both children at the counter, which had to be done in the first week or a fine of two hundred rupees per child applied from the eighth.

This was not a hardship arrangement. Sanjay Ranade earned adequately. What he did not have, in January 2005, was two months of a school fee sitting idle in a savings account, because eleven months earlier he had put every spare rupee into the deposit for a flat of his own — a flat he was buying precisely because five adults and two children in a two-bedroom transit flat for what was now nineteen months had become a thing he thought about at three in the morning.

So on the fifth of January he did not have the fees. On the eighth the fine applied. On the eleventh he paid, four hundred rupees over, and the elder child was asked in front of her class on the ninth whether her fees had been paid, and said she did not know, and came home and did not mention it, and mentioned it four years later.

Four hundred rupees. Plus the thing that happened in the classroom, which had no price and which Sanjay Ranade would have paid a great deal to undo.

Here is why nobody told Jagdish Wagh.

Sanjay did not tell him because Sanjay was thirty-eight and had a deposit on a flat and two children and a mother with bad knees, and because the sentence he would have had to say was the rent was eight days late and my daughter was asked about her fees in class, and he could hear in advance how small it would sound in the mouth of a man saying it to a builder in an office. It was four hundred rupees. He was not a man who complained about four hundred rupees. That was, in fact, exactly the reason.

Mrs. Ranade did not tell him because she had asked him one thing in her life, about lifts, and he had given it to her, and she was of a generation and a temperament that counted a thing given.

Bhalerao did not tell him because Bhalerao did not know. He had covered two cheques out of the society’s account and had assumed, reasonably, that the families he had not covered were the families that did not need covering. He had never asked the Ranades whether they needed it, because asking a man in that position whether he needs nine days of money is itself an event.

And Jagdish did not know to ask, because in Jagdish’s understanding of the transaction — the understanding he had explained to his own daughter for eleven minutes at a dinner table in April 2003 — the transit rent was the mechanism by which a family out of its house was made whole. It was a payment. Payments have amounts and dates. It had gone out eight days late once, on a notified basis, with advance warning given, and had then gone out on the first of the month for the next sixteen months without fail, which he considered — and he was correct, by the standard of that trade in that district in that decade — an excellent record.

The number in his head for the January rent was: one occurrence, notified, cured in nine days.

The number in the Ranade household was: four hundred rupees, and a girl standing up in a classroom.

It is the same event. There is no dispute about a single fact in it. And the two numbers do not communicate, and there is no page anywhere in the agreement, the accounts, the minutes or the site diary where they could ever have been written down next to each other.

Sanjay Ranade said nothing about it until the eleventh of August 2006, in a hall in Kopar, when he was asked directly, in front of everybody, whether the delay had cost him anything, and said that it had not.

He said that because his daughter was in the room.

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