Part Three — The Handover · Chapter 25 of 40

Meera Says It

She had not been at the meeting.

That is worth establishing, because everything she said that night she said having heard it secondhand, from Bhalerao’s wife, on the telephone, at about ten o’clock, in a conversation that lasted six minutes and that neither woman ever described to her husband.

Meera Wagh had gone to the meeting in November 2005 and had sat at the end of the second row and had heard him not do the thing she had asked him to do the previous evening. She did not go to the one in August. When he told her on the Wednesday that it was fixed for Friday she said, “I know,” and did not say anything else, and he did not ask her to come, and both of those are facts about a marriage in its twenty-second year.

He got in at about a quarter past ten with eleven pages in a notebook and found the flat dark except for the kitchen.

She was standing, not sitting. There was tea made and she had not poured it.

“You asked them what it cost,” she said.

“Bhalerao’s wife.”

He put the notebook on the counter. He had been carrying it since the car and had not been able to put it down at any point in thirty-five minutes.

“I wanted to know,” he said.

“I know you did.” She turned round then. “That’s not what I’m going to say to you. Sit down.”

He sat down.

“You asked them what it cost,” Meera said, “because you wanted it to be payable.”

He did not answer.

“That is not a cruel thing to say and I am not saying it to hurt you. It is the best thing about you and it has been the best thing about you since I met you. Something goes wrong, you find the number, you pay the number, and it is finished and you sleep. You did it with the well. Twenty-six lakh, out of your own margin, and you did not blink, and I have never once in twenty-two years seen you flinch at a number.

“So tonight you stood up in a hall and you asked eleven families for the number. And they gave you a wall and a school and an old man who won’t recognise his own room and a Diwali. And you have come home holding that book like it is a thing you can settle on Monday morning.”

“There’s no total,” Jagdish said.

“No.”

“I’ve been sitting in the car for half an hour trying to make one.”

“I know,” said Meera. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

She poured the tea then and sat down opposite him, and there was a stretch of some minutes in which nothing was said, and he read her four sentences over in his head, and could not find the place where any of them was wrong.

“Say the rest of it,” he said.

“That is the rest of it.”

“Meera.”

“That is the rest of what I am going to say tonight.”

And there it is: the second time in this book that a person in possession of something has declined to hand it over, and the first time was three years and six months earlier at the bottom of a staircase in Thane, when a man called Chitnis told a story about fishermen and Jagdish Wagh said it was a bad plot and let the table fill in the rest.

He recognised it. That is the unbearable part of the chapter and it is not stated anywhere in the scene, because neither of them stated it. He sat in his own kitchen at half past ten at night and watched his wife stop at exactly the place where a person stops when the next sentence belongs to them and not to the room, and he knew the manoeuvre from the inside, because he had performed it, and he did not have a single word he could say about it.

“Is it about the date?” he asked.

“No.”

“Is it about Shivaji Chowk?”

Meera drank her tea.

“Ask me in a few years,” she said.

He asked her twice more in his life.

The first time was in November 2008, in a car, four days after a signature, and she said no.

The second time was in 2009, in a hospital corridor, at a moment when a man asks whatever question he has left, and she answered him, and what she said is not in this book, because she said it to him.

What can be recorded is what she did on the twelfth of August 2006, the morning after, which was to go into the office on a Saturday, which she had not done in eight years, and to take the Shivaji Chowk folders out of the cupboard, and to sit with them for four hours with the door open, and to put them back.

Pallavi, who came in on Saturdays to do the wages, made her tea at eleven and again at one, and noticed — because Pallavi noticed everything and reported none of it — that Meera bai was not reading. She had the folders open and she was not turning the pages.

At about two o’clock she came out and stood in front of the schedule board in the room with the window that looked at another window.

The board still said, in her husband’s handwriting, in permanent marker, in the Shivaji Chowk column: Completion: Aug 2005.

He had told Salvi in September 2005 to leave it, that he would change it when they had been told. They had been told in November and he had not changed it. They had been told again in August and he had not changed it.

Meera Wagh stood in front of it for a while. Then she took the cloth off the hook, and wiped the column, and wrote, in her own hand, which was smaller and straighter than his:

Completion: Oct 2006 (Salvi).

And underneath it, which nobody in that firm ever explained and which Pallavi looked at every working day for two more years without once asking:

Contract date was 22.8.05.