Part Four — The Ground · Chapter 39 of 40

The Trust

Ketkar drew the deed in August and it was registered on the fourth of September 2009, seven weeks after the funeral.

The objects were narrow, at Jagdish’s insistence and against Ketkar’s advice, which was that a trust should be drafted wide because you cannot predict forty years. Jagdish wanted it narrow: the construction, extension and repair of classrooms and school buildings, and nothing else. No scholarships. No prizes. No books.

“You are excluding the things people usually want to give money to,” Ketkar said.

“I know what I’m good at.”

That is the whole of the reasoning and it is in the minutes of the first meeting in those words, because Aditi took the minutes and wrote down what he said.

The trustees were Jagdish, Meera, Aditi, and Athavale, who was asked because he had been a schoolmaster for thirty-one years and because Jagdish wanted one person in the room who had no reason to be polite about a school building.

Nikhil was offered a trusteeship in a letter and declined it in a letter, in four lines, warmly, without giving a reason. He has given to it every year since, by bank transfer, on the thirteenth of July, in an amount that has increased as his salary has, and he has never once attended a meeting.

Nobody in that family has ever raised either of those facts with him. They are both simply true, every year, in the same week.

The initial corpus was fifty-one lakh.

It is the same figure as the retention tank at the creek plot — the contour survey, the two infiltration tests, the tank under the podium, the easement with the warehouse company, all of it, concluded that March at fifty-one lakh against the forty to sixty he had done in his head standing in four inches of water on the twenty-ninth of September 2008.

This book is not going to tell you what that means, because it does not know.

Three people noticed. Pallavi, who wrote the cheque and had also processed every invoice on the tank, noticed and said nothing to anybody for eleven years and then mentioned it once, in 2020, at a retirement lunch, to Aditi, who said, “I know,” and changed the subject.

Meera noticed on the day and said nothing at all, then or ever.

And Jagdish Wagh knew what he had done, and had done it deliberately, and could not have told you at any point in the remaining twenty-two years of his life whether it was a settling of accounts, a private joke of a very bleak kind, or simply the number that happened to be available in the account that month, which it also was.

The first project was the school.

Not because it was his mother’s — the trustees debated that for forty minutes at the second meeting, and Athavale argued against it on the grounds that a trust which begins by repairing the founder’s own sentiment will never repair anything else, and he was right. What decided it was that Jagdish went and looked at the roof over the west wing and it was, on any assessment, the worst roof of the four schools they had surveyed.

They rebuilt it in the summer holidays of 2010, in fifty-one days, and the trust paid for the whole of it and the school offered to name the wing.

Jagdish declined. The deed has a clause in it, at clause 14, which Ketkar drafted at his instruction in August 2009 and which prohibits the trust from putting the name of any trustee or donor on any structure it funds. It is the only unusual clause in the document.

The school put up a board anyway, in 2011, without asking, which said that the west wing was rebuilt in memory of Sumati Vasant Wagh, teacher, 1959–1992.

That is not a trustee’s name and it is not a donor’s name and there is nothing in clause 14 that touches it, and Ketkar, when consulted, said so with great enjoyment.

The board is still there.

What Jagdish had planned was to fund the trust himself, at a rate of some lakhs a year, for as long as he was working, and to leave it something at the end. He had modelled it. He had a sheet.

Money started arriving in November 2009 and he could not stop it.

The 1978 batch, who had hired the bus, sent thirty-one thousand rupees collected among twenty-two of them, with a covering letter listing every name.

A doctor in Thane who had been taught by her in 1969 and had not been at the funeral because he had not heard in time sent a lakh and asked for nothing.

The school’s own staff, current, nine of them, none of whom had ever worked with her, put in a standing instruction of five hundred rupees a month between them.

Bhalerao sent two thousand and a note in his small upright hand saying that his wife had been taught by Sumati teacher in 1953 and that he was aware this was a small amount and that he was retired.

And the man of about fifty-five, whom nobody in the family had recognised, who had taken Jagdish by both hands in a courtyard and said something about 1970 and a workshop and four children with degrees, and who had gone away without giving his name — he turned out to be called Vidhate, and he was the proprietor of a firm that made pressed-metal components in Ambernath, and he came to the office above the bank in January 2010 and sat down and said he would like to fund one classroom a year for the rest of his life.

He has done it. It was eleven classrooms by 2021.

Jagdish Wagh sat in the eleven-by-nine room in January 2010 with Vidhate’s letter of intent on the desk and understood that the thing he had constructed as a private transaction between himself and his mother’s memory had, within four months, stopped being his.

It had about ninety donors by 2012 and something over four hundred by 2020, and the overwhelming majority of them gave small amounts, every year, without being asked twice, because of a woman who had marked their Marathi in red.

He had wanted — he was honest enough with himself about this, eventually, and admitted it to Meera in about 2015 — he had wanted to pay for it. All of it. Alone. To find the number and pay the number and have it be finished, which is what he had wanted in a school hall in Kopar in August 2006 when he stood up and asked eleven households what it had cost them, and which is what his wife had told him about himself in a kitchen at half past ten that night in four sentences he had never been able to find a flaw in.

He was not allowed to. Three hundred people had come to that funeral, and about four hundred have now given money, and not one of them was settling anything.

Whatever Jagdish Wagh built the Sumati Wagh Trust for, it was taken off him within four months by people who had a different reason, and that is the best thing that ever happened to it. A trust funded by one man’s account is an account. A trust funded by four hundred people who were taught Marathi in red ink is an institution, and it has outlasted him, and it will outlast the roof it put on the west wing in 2010.

He stopped trying to pay for all of it in about 2011. He said afterwards that letting go of it was harder than the money and better than the money, and he learned it from Vidhate, who never knew he had taught anybody anything.