Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 23 of 40

Contract and Promise

Ketkar’s office was two rooms above a chemist on the station road, and it had been two rooms above a chemist since 1979, and there were files on the floor in stacks that the clerk could navigate in the dark and nobody else could navigate at all.

Jagdish went at three on the tenth of August with a photocopy Bhalerao had permitted him to make, on condition that the original stayed with the society, which was a condition Bhalerao had stated as if it were an apology and which was in fact the single most professional thing anybody did that week.

Ketkar read the five lines twice.

“This is nothing,” he said.

“Read it again.”

“I have read it three times, Wagh saheb, and it is nothing.” He put the photocopy down and took off his glasses. “It is a private note by an office bearer, unsigned, uncirculated, not part of the minutes, not initialled by you or by anybody, made in a personal book that also contains — ” he turned it over ” — a note about a leaking terrace. As a record of a contractual term it is worth nothing at all. The contractual term is clause 9 and clause 9 says twenty-six months from vacant possession subject to 9(b), and 9(b) is why you are not, at this moment, in any difficulty.”

“Go on.”

“Rain, September 2003 — 9(b)(iv). Delay in approval of the amended plan, February to June 2004, four and a half months on a file you applied for diligently and pursued — that is 9(b)(ii) and it is the cleanest force majeure claim I have seen in nine years, because you have Pallavi bai’s receipts for both dates and the file number and four visits.” Ketkar counted on his fingers, and he was enjoying it, which was not cruelty; it was a craftsman finding the job easier than expected. “Sub-soil conditions materially different from the geotechnical report — 9(b)(vii), and you have Pradhan’s note and twenty-six lakh of invoices and photographs of a brick well with a tape in the frame.”

“The photographs were Salvi’s idea.”

“Then Salvi is worth what you pay him.” Ketkar put his glasses back on. “Wagh saheb, on the documents, your defensible period is something on the order of thirty-four to thirty-six months against a contractual twenty-six. If this society went to a consumer forum tomorrow, which they will not, they would recover the transit rent, which you are already paying, and possibly some costs, and it would take them four years, and I would advise them, if I were on the other side, not to bother.”

“And the notebook?”

“The notebook,” said Ketkar, “is a man’s diary.”

“It’s not, though,” Jagdish said.

Ketkar waited.

“You’ve told me what it is legally, and you’re right, and I’m not going to argue with a word of it.” Jagdish had not sat back in the chair since he came in. “Now tell me what happens on Friday at seven o’clock when Bhalerao is sitting in the second row with it in his bag.”

“Nothing happens. He will not produce it. He has already shown it to you privately, which tells you he does not intend to ambush you—”

“He won’t produce it. He won’t have to.” Jagdish put two fingers on the photocopy. “There are twenty-nine people in that room and about nine of them were standing at the back in February 2003, and the ones who were there remember that I said something to an old woman about boxes, and the ones who weren’t there have been told about it, because it is the kind of thing that gets told. It has been in that society for three and a half years. It is not evidence, Ketkar saheb. It is the reason they voted.”

“That may be so—”

“It is so. Kelkar the tailor told me it was so on a step in Kopar in 2003 and I did not listen properly.” He sat back at last. “They did not vote for clause 9. Nobody in the history of this district has ever voted for clause 9. They voted for a man who came and told them the ground was bad before the vote and who said a thing to a woman of seventy-eight in front of everybody. That is what they bought. And you are telling me that what I sold them and what I am contractually obliged to deliver are two different objects, and you are right, and it does not help me.”

Ketkar was quiet for a moment.

“No,” he said. “It does not help you.”

Here is the exact position, because the book has been building to it for twenty-two chapters and it deserves to be stated without any drama at all.

Neither of them was lying. Neither of them was even shading it.

Ketkar’s account was complete and correct. The agreement was the agreement; it had been drafted scrupulously by a man who put doors in but not traps; it had been read by three careful people and improved by one of them; and under it, Jagdish Wagh at thirty-eight months against a contractual twenty-six with 9(b) in his pocket was a builder in good standing who was going to hand over eleven flats larger than the ones he took, on the floors specified, with the transit rent paid every month for thirty-eight months, including nine days late once, notified in advance.

By the standard of that trade in that district in that decade he was, and this is not generosity, in the top decile.

And the room’s account was also complete and correct. Eleven households had voted on the strength of a man’s conduct, and the conduct that persuaded them was the conduct of a builder who volunteered bad news at his own cost. That builder had then gone silent for thirty-four months — through a well, an amendment, a supplier, a slab cycle, a date that passed on a Monday in August 2005 while nobody in his office said anything — and had come once, in November, with a number built out of green lights, and had then gone silent for another nine.

Both of those are true about the same man and the same three years.

The contract measures one of them. There is no instrument anywhere in the transaction that measures the other, which is why Bhalerao had to buy a register for forty-two rupees and invent one.

“What do I do?” Jagdish said.

“Legally? Nothing. Say nothing on Friday that you cannot support. Give them a programme, not a date. Do not apologise in terms that concede a breach—”

“Ketkar saheb.”

“—and do not, under any circumstances, discuss compensation in that hall, because the moment you put a figure in the air you have created an expectation and I will spend two years taking it out of the air again.” He stopped. “You asked me what to do and that is what I am for. Now ask me the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“You have been my client for nineteen years,” said Ketkar, “and you have never once brought me a letter from a society before answering it yourself. You did that on the fourteenth of July. Which means you knew in July that you were going to need me, and a man who knows in July that he is going to need a lawyer is not asking me what to do. He is asking me to tell him that what he has already decided is permitted.”

Jagdish looked at the stacks of files on the floor.

“I’m going to tell them October,” he said.

“Is October true?”

“Salvi’s figure this morning is the second week of October and he’ll put his name to it.”

“Then tell them October and stop there.” Ketkar stood, which was how he ended meetings. “And Wagh saheb — whatever else you are planning to say in that hall on Friday, sleep on it first. A man who is right about the contract and wrong about the room usually solves it by making a speech, and the speech is always the thing his lawyer reads about later.”

He came in on the eleventh of August at seven o’clock with the programme in his hand and Salvi beside him, and he made the speech.