Part One — The Promise · Chapter 1 of 40

The Promise

The fans in the Shivaji Chowk society hall had been dead since the Diwali before last, and nobody had raised it at a meeting, because raising it would have meant agreeing on who paid. So in February the room was merely cold, and the fans hung above the gathering like a question that had been tabled.

Jagdish Wagh had come early. He always came early, and he always regretted it, because coming early meant standing in a doorway being looked at while people arranged chairs. He was forty-five. He had a builder’s forearms and an accountant’s shirt, and he stood with his hands behind his back the way his mother had taught him to stand at school functions, which meant that half the men in the room recognised the posture before they recognised the man.

“Wagh saheb.” Bhalerao came at him sideways between the chairs, secretary’s file under one arm. “You’re early.”

“You said seven.”

“I said seven so people would come at seven-thirty.” Bhalerao said it without embarrassment. He had been secretary of the Shivaji Chowk Cooperative Housing Society for nine years and had learned that the truth of a starting time was a separate thing from the starting time. “Sit, sit. Not there. That chair has a nail.”

They sat. The hall filled the way such halls fill, which is to say by household rather than by person: a man arriving alone and then reappearing forty minutes later flanked by a wife, a mother, a son home from a hostel for exactly this. Eleven families. Jagdish had the list in his pocket and had not needed to look at it since December. Bhalerao. Kanetkar. Deshpande, two brothers, two flats, one kitchen wall knocked through between them in 1988 without permission. Ranade. Joshi. Gokhale, whose father had bought in on the original allotment. Four more he could have named in his sleep and one, the Naiks, who had bought last year and whose entire relationship with the building was the money they had put into it.

He watched them come in. It was the part of the work he had never been able to explain to Meera, who thought that a builder’s job began at the drawing and ended at the handover. The job began here. Everything after was arithmetic.

Bhalerao stood at ten past eight and read the agenda, which had one item on it, and then said, “Most of you know Wagh saheb,” in the tone of a man conceding a point.

“Everyone knows Wagh saheb,” someone said from the back. There was a small laugh, the kind that is not entirely friendly and not entirely otherwise.

Jagdish stood. He did not have notes. He had discovered years ago that notes were read as a kind of armour, and that a man reading from paper in a society hall was understood to be protecting himself from something, which raised the immediate question of what.

“You have my company’s proposal,” he said. “You have had it eleven weeks. I am not going to read it to you.”

Someone’s chair scraped.

“I will tell you the three things people actually want to know, and then you will ask me the things I have not thought of, and those are usually the important ones.” He counted them off against his fingers, which was a habit from site meetings and which he had never managed to suppress. “One. Every family gets a flat larger than the flat it has now — the carpet areas are in the schedule, they are not the same for everyone, and if yours is smaller than your neighbour’s it is because your flat is smaller than your neighbour’s now. Two. While the building is coming down and going up, you do not live here. You live in transit accommodation that I arrange and I pay for, at Kopar side, and I pay your rent on the first of the month, and if I am late you may call me at home, and Bhalerao saheb will give you the number whether I like it or not.”

That got the laugh he had aimed for. It was an old line. It worked because it was true; the number was in the agreement, on page nine, and he had never in eleven years had a society take it out.

“Three.” He stopped counting. “You will want to know how long.”

The room did the thing rooms do — not silence, exactly. A settling.

“Twenty-six months,” he said. “From the day the last family hands me its keys.”

Later — much later, in a different room, with a lawyer beside him and Bhalerao’s file open on the table between them — Jagdish would be asked to account for what happened in the next nine minutes, and he would find that he could account for all of it, and that accounting for it did not help.

What happened was that they asked him questions and he answered them.

Gokhale asked what happened if the corporation sat on a permission. Jagdish said permissions were his problem, not theirs, which was true, and that he built the waiting into the twenty-six, which was also true, and that he had built in more than he expected to use, which was true in February.

Mrs. Ranade asked whether the transit flats had lifts, because of her knees. Jagdish said two of the four buildings did and that she would be in one of them. He had not checked. He checked the next morning and it was fine, and he never mentioned that he had not checked.

The elder Deshpande asked, with the air of a man laying a trap he had rehearsed, whether Wagh saheb intended to sell the extra flats to outsiders or to people the society had approved. Jagdish said outsiders, and said it flatly, and said that any builder who told him otherwise was lying to him, and that the society could approve or not approve but the flats would be sold to whoever bought them. It was the least popular thing he said all evening and it was the answer that made three of them decide to trust him. He knew that when he said it. It was not calculation exactly. It was closer to a reflex that had been rewarded so many times it had stopped feeling like a choice.

And then, from somewhere near the door, in the part of the room where the people who had come late were still standing, an old woman’s voice said:

“Twenty-six months. Not twenty-eight, not thirty. You are saying it in front of everybody.”

Jagdish looked. Mrs. Kanetkar was seventy-eight and had been in flat 4 since the building opened. She was holding the back of a chair rather than sitting in it, and she was looking at him with the particular patience of a woman who had watched four decades of men say things in front of everybody.

“I am saying it in front of everybody,” Jagdish said.

“My husband’s brother went into transit in Diva. Twenty months, they told him. He died in the fifth year. In the transit flat. Not in his house.”

Nobody in the room moved.

“I know,” Jagdish said. Because he did know; it was in Diva, it was 1997, and it was one of the stories the trade told itself about what happened to builders who ran out of money halfway. “That was a builder called Phadtare and he was finished before he started. I am not going to tell you I am a better man than Phadtare. I will tell you that I have eleven societies behind me and every one of them is standing, and you can go and stand in front of any of them tomorrow, and I will pay for your rickshaw.”

“I don’t want a rickshaw,” said Mrs. Kanetkar. “I want to die in my own house.”

Jagdish Wagh had been in this business for twenty-one years, and he had been in this exact room — not this room; this kind of room — perhaps two hundred times, and he was good at it, and he knew the answer to this. The answer was: nobody can promise you that, Aaji, but I can promise you the flat. The answer was to make the small promise loudly so that the large one stayed unmade. He had given that answer in Thakurli, in Ambernath, twice in Kalyan. It was a good answer. It had the enormous advantage of being true.

What he said was:

“Twenty-six months. You’ll be back in your own house and I will carry the boxes up myself.”

It is worth being precise about what that sentence was, because a great deal turns on it.

It was not a term of the development agreement. The development agreement, which was signed eleven weeks later and which ran to forty-one pages, specified a construction period of twenty-six months from vacant possession, subject to a schedule of force majeure conditions occupying most of page twenty-two, and provided for transit rent at a stated monthly figure escalating at seven per cent annually, and made no reference whatsoever to any individual resident, or to boxes, or to who would carry them.

It was not a lie. In February of 2003, Jagdish Wagh believed every part of it, including the part about the boxes, and would have been surprised and a little insulted to be told that belief was not the same as capacity.

And it was not, whatever Bhalerao’s file would later suggest by the simple act of writing it down, a moment anybody in that hall considered significant while it was happening. The meeting went on for another fifty minutes. The Naiks raised a question about the corpus payment that took eleven of them. The elder Deshpande’s trap was sprung and dismantled twice more. When it ended, four people came up to shake Jagdish’s hand and one of them was Mrs. Kanetkar’s son, who apologised for his mother, and Jagdish said there was nothing to apologise for, and meant it.

The vote, when it came in March, was nine in favour, one against, one abstaining. The one against was the younger Deshpande, on a point about the kitchen wall.

He walked home. It was not far — nothing in Dombivli was far, that was the whole trouble with Dombivli — and the walk took him down past the chowk itself and then west, into the older streets, where the buildings were four floors and the wires went over the road in bundles thick as a man’s arm.

He thought about the twenty-six months. Not anxiously. He had run the schedule three times with Salvi and once alone, and the third time he had added five weeks that he had not told anybody about, not even Meera, on the principle that a hidden margin was the only kind that survived. He was thinking about it the way a man thinks about a number that is his.

At the corner of the lane a boy was doing something illegal to a cable junction with a wet screwdriver, and Jagdish stopped and told him to get down, and the boy got down, and Jagdish went on.

His mother was awake. She was seventy-something and increasingly indifferent to the hour, and she was sitting in the front room with the light on and a school register open on her knees, marking a set of papers for a school that had retired her eleven years ago and had never quite managed to say so.

“Meeting?” she said.

“Shivaji Chowk. They’ll vote yes.”

“Kanetkar’s mother is in that building.”

“She spoke.”

Sumati Wagh looked up. “What did she say?”

“She said she wants to die in her own house.”

His mother considered this for a while. Outside, a train went through towards Kalyan and the window frame rattled in its socket, the way it had rattled since 1971.

“And what did you say?”

“I said twenty-six months.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Jagdish stood in the doorway of the front room with his shoes still on, which she hated, and he found that he did not want to repeat the rest of it. This was interesting to him in a distant way, like a small pain in a part of the body that has never hurt before, and he examined it for a second and then put it down.

“I said I’d carry her boxes up,” he said.

His mother wrote something in the margin of a boy’s paper, in red, in the handwriting that half of Dombivli could have identified at fifty paces.

“Then carry them,” she said.